I’ve been sleeping well the last couple nights — a bit too well, since my blog writing has fallen behind slightly, but at least I’m getting pretty close to 7-8 hours a night despite the stone mattress that Kel uses here. A couple of those hours per day are usually out on the couch in the living room as well, which is significantly more comfortable, but all that still counts, right. I’ve not been able to extract any actual dreams for the dream diary though, which is annoying because I know I’m dreaming well, and I can remember bits and pieces and… feelings, but not enough to put down in concrete words.

Oh wel. The other thing worth noting too is that it is looking more likely that I will just stay here until Friday or Saturday and then jet right to Shanghai directly, the intermediate stop between Guangzhou and Shanghai is likely going to get nixed just due to time since I need to wait for packages to arrive anyway before I leave, and because both of us seem content with me being here. So I’ll do Shanghai from the 14th afternoon to the 19th early early morning, then Tokyo or somewhere else from the 19th to the 23rd.

I haven’t quite bought the remaining ticket for my trip yet, which is the Guangzhou to Shanghai leg, but once I do the two ends of my itinerary will finally be connected together and I’ll be good to go for the rest of the trip, unless I decide to go somewhere else from the 19th to the 22nd as well. I’m only nearly 75% through my trip, I guess it’s time to actually finally plan my trip and get my tickets! Teehee. This not-home place does have a certain comfort and familiarity level that is making me miss home though. Nearly there, Tigey.

With all that planning, I again only left the house at about 2:30 pm today. I actually wanted to take the train myself today, so I hopped down into the warren of tunnels below the Clifford Wonderland area, passing this thing on the way to the train station:

This reminded me of what I know as the Tobidashi-kun‘s from Japan! How grotesquely cute. I took the train to Guangzhou South station, and then transferred over to a line that took me to the Haizhu Square station. A long and boring hour or so later, I arrived at the station, which looks like this on the outside:

I walked one street over from there and reached my target for the day, Onelink International Plaza:

This was a tall building, the retail portion of it was about eight levels up and one level down and there were offices above that as well.

To give an idea of what this place sold, here’s a snapshot of the directory as well:

These categories were just a suggestion though, which annoyed me — while I did not have time to visit all the levels, floral decorations were everywhere, there were no anime/comic products on level 4 (there were a little on level 5, I think, and B1 though), there were no accessories on level 9, and there was a single shop seling bread on level 4, a single restaurant on level 9 seling Georgian food, and no food and beverage on level 1 at all except outside the building.

But still, this was a wholesale building full of market stalls, many of which, especially on the lower levels, were happy to sell to visitors too. And there were a lot of them. I heard probably more English here from other random people that I was passing, than anywhere else that I had visited in China thus far. Probably combined, too. This includes the shopkeepers, who seemingly could and did converse with passersby in basic English. There were lots of tourists, so I guess this is actually a fairly famous tourist attraction in its own right. Me, I never checked the lists to begin with so it was a surprise to me to see people wandering around talking about what would fit in their luggage before they fly home.

I did walk around for some time looking for food, before I gave up and went outside the actual plaza for food, but for organizational sake I’ll push those photos to later on. Not that there were many photos today all in all since plenty of shops didn’t accept photos and plenty of the other ones that didn’t care looked the same as other shops.

But instead, for now, here’s where I eventually went for lunch. This was a store across the road and around the corner, which was just called Chaozhou Fishball Noodles, and guess what they sold and that I bought from them? Chaozhou Five-Colour Fishball Noodles!

This was their menu:

My meal (I just ordered a small bowl):

And the condiments next to the bowl, along with a little bit of the street outside:

I took this third shot to remind me of an amusing incident, as I was finishing up my meal an old woman walks in to the shop and to my table, since I was the first table by the entrance. She literally picked up the lid of the metal pot on the left, peered into it, then asked me if it was spicy. I told her it was a little spicy, and she nodded, put down the lid, and walked further in, haha. Sorry ma’am, normal spice doesn’t really affect me at all.

I went back to the plaza after my late lunch and remained there until Kel yelled at me that she was done work. So next are a couple of shots from each level of the plaza that I did visit. These were from Basement 1 — the toy level.

This Coconut Weather Forecasting sign made me laugh — especially the last one. If the weather coconut plushie is gone from wherever its placed, it means a typhoon came by and swept it away.

These are generic photos of stores from the level:

This next one that I wandered into told me, for whatever reason, that they did not do individual sales and only sold in bulk. Odd to have a store like this down in the B1 level, so close to a high traffic touristy area.

The only things I bought from the plaza turned out to be from this level, specifically a pipa plushie from this store for 10 yuan:

They’re Jellyfin knockoffs! Sort of! But chinese instrument versions! I was considering haggling because I think you might be supposed to do that here, but eh, I just paid the listed price for them.

And the other thing was a guzheng keychain from this store, it’s near the bottom left of this picture. This one cost 3 yuan.

Pipa and guzheng are both Chinese musical instruments, so I guess that was the sort of mood I was in. Here’s Tigey posing with his new friends later on:

Aren’t they adorable together? The pipa definitely isn’t a facehugger in disguise.

Next up, level 1 of the mall. Level 1 was by far the most “touristy” level, both in terms of people as well as in terms of shopkeepers hawking their wares. Although there was one shopkeeper teaching another one how to do calisthenics or something in front of their shops as they laughed and had a good bonding time together, that one I didn’t manage to politely snap a hidden picture of though.

But overall it was not my thing, and I did not stay here long, just long enough to find out that there were no food shops inside here.

Level 2 was “Fashion accessories, stationery, and daily necessities” level, but I mostly remember it for anime blind boxes, mostly due to this first store.

And some random pictures from the rest of the level:

Even though I’m only tossing out a couple of pictures per level, each level was fairly big — I think there are easily 70-80 stores per level, possibly as many as 100, though some stores were larger than other ones and occupied multiple storefronts.

I skipped level 3 entirely so no pictures from there.

Level 4 was the first actual level I explored chronologically, more so because I was looking for the alleged “food and beverages” section here than the anime stuff here. Neither was anywhere to be found though. There was one tiny little bread cafe in a corner, as noted earlier, but it was very poor and completely empty and I didn’t bother with it. But because this was the first level I explored, it’s also the one I took the most “general shots” of.

I really like tableware and strongly considered several of these to bring back with me, but didn’t get any in the end. But they were so cheap and pretty…

I also did find some *fake* plastic food stores and wondered if that justified the “food and beverages” category for the level.

I almost did buy one of those but the owner of the stall wasn’t around, which happened more and more the higher I went in the building. Usually there was just an Alipay QR payment code, a WeChat QR payment code, and then a third QR code for what I think was the person’s actual WeChat account, and I think the point there was to scan that, contact them, and then they’d come by from whatever store they were actually at to come serve you. Who knows for sure though, and even though WeChat has automatic message translation, I definitely was not going to do that unless I really, really wanted an item, which I didn’t. Example card sign here (the green ones are WeChat and the blue one is Alipay):

I also almost bought one of these plushies but decided not to in the end as well. So many things, so tempting.

There were also lots of ceramics and pottery andthings that look like them on level 4 in particular, and a couple of them outright admitted they were 3D printed, which makes sense, many of the bizarrely shaped vases and stuff probably will. Over the afternoon, I definitely saw several designs and logos and things like that for sale that were definitely generated by low-grade AI, too.

Next up, level 5. Level 5 officially was “Home decorations, tea culture hall, cigar culture hall”. I think to me it was just “plants and lots of other random things”.

This next store was very pungent.

Giant flowers! Contrasting with tiny plateware next to it!

Ships in a bottle! Those were super cute. Another store with no proprietor present though.

I skipped level 6 and 7 as well, and went up to 8 after this. 8 was the topmost level that the main passenger elevators would reach, 9 was escalator only and 10 (and higher) required an office elevator.

Most of level 8 was dominated by a weird plaza area called the Belt and Road International Business and Trade Center. It was a rest area surrounded by little shelves, each one labelled with a different country, with products, largely foodstuff, from said country on the shelf. Oddly, if I’m not mistaken, some of the items were actually on sale and could be purchased for consumption or to be brought home, I think, whereas others were just display products only and could not be bought. It was really strange.

There were also a couple administrative shops like this Guangzhou Toy & Gifts Association, where I picked up a bunch of brochures to scan:

And a couple of actual large shops. Not sure if they were retail or wholesale only at this point. One sold water bottles:

And another large plants and flowers:

I do believe there were a couple others as well, but not many. I wonder how these two shops specifically got chosen or managed to buy space way up here. Despite how out of the way it was, I still saw a steady trickle of people find their way up here over time.

And finally, since I skipped level 10 too, we have level 9. Which was guarded by an Iron Man, a symbol that China loves a lot.

Level 9 had a Georgian restaurant with an indoor seating area and then a nice-looking outdoor terrace that I could see from the entrance.

And there was this posh-looking room too that I could see but had no idea what it was for.

And then the highlight of the floor, this toy store:

The store was big and shiny and basically was shaped like a huge piece of macaroni. A large tunnel that curved twice to form a shape approaching a semicircle.

I didn’t buy anything from here, but I was mildly tempted to buy some of the better-made building blocks:

But seeing very obviously AI-generated things on sale, like this one below, gave me pause, and in the end I did not buy anything from the shop.

That concludes the picture tour of the Onelink International Plaza. My remaining pictures deal with the small things that happened outside of my visit here. For example, these Guangming 光明 bottles of milk:

They are bottles that I first found and drank from a Jiangmen supermarket called Dachang Supermarket slightly over a week ago. Dachang only seems to exist in Jiangmen though, but Kel saw mine and said she wanted to try them and keep the bottles too, so we’ve been keeping an eye out whenever we visit a grocery store, supermarket, or convenience store. Finally, today I found those ones above in a convenience store, of all places, called 8-Mart. They’re still not the “leechee” flavoured ones, which she prefers to try, but I bought the front two ones back for us to drink anyway. She didn’t really like the drink in the end and I feel like I didn’t like mine as much this time either. I wonder why. But hey, now we get to keep these bottles too!

And this bus ad, captured while I was on my way back to Clifford Wonderland in a Didi:

This was an ad for OMG Influencer Street, or OMG网红街, the crazy factory-turned-shopping-mall that Kel and I visited three days ago. I was amused to see it plastered on the back of a Guangzhou Public Transport bus.

I took that ride back to Clifford to meet up with Kel again, she had a late day at work and so could not afford the time to go anywhere too far to eat, so we decided to just have dinner at one of the random restaurants below her block. We ended up at a place called Zhu Ao Ao, and I had these Stir-fried Chicken Giblets with Rice Noodles:

Kel also bought some meatballs that can be seen photobombing that picture.

For herself, however, Kel bought a dish that in Chinese was called 设计师杀猪粉 — it’s a hard one to translate, Google Translate straight up calls it “Designer’s Pig-Killing Powder” because 粉 is powder but also a common abbreviation for 米粉, or noodles.

The official signboard in front of the shop also made the same error, calling it “Kill Pig Powder”

(It also left what seems to be a placeholder “Signboard” line there.)

Gemini had a much better explanation for this dish though. Without me sending a picture or telling it what store it was from or any other info at all aside from its Chinese name, it correctly identified the shop and its ingredients, and said that this dish, Designer Shazhufen, is a trendy version of a street dish from Chenzhou in Hunan, with the “Designer” part being something about how the brand tries to market it online on the Internet, appealing to influencers and such, and the rest of it is basically the name of the dish, rice noodle soup with pork offal. Interesting.

Kel and I spent the evening discussing the items that were coming in via Taobao and also what day and time I would be leaving the house. It looks like the most convenient day for me would be Saturday, the 14th, as opposed to Friday, and the best route would be to fly instead of take the train, but I haven’t booked the ticket yet and we’ll let it ride to tomorrow to see what happens once we have a bit more clarity with some of the packages that we ordered. At least one hasn’t even been sent out by its seller yet, while a couple meant for Mom have already arrived.